Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith are the big-game hunters of modern art history. Their previous doorstop biography of a legendary painter, Jackson Pollock: an American Saga (1989), was fact-packed enough to win a Pulitzer yet also riotous enough to inspire a Hollywood biopic. Van Gogh: the Life, which similarly rushes along on a tide of research, could do the same. Yet if it does – and unlike all previous films about the iconic, splenetic Dutchman – it won’t end with Van Gogh shooting himself.

Vincent van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

For in a revelation that has already efficiently publicised this 912-page opus, Naifeh and White Smith’s tireless investigating suggests that Van Gogh’s “suitably tragic” exit – his suicide – isn’t factual. Nor, apparently, did he die in the wheat field of his final painting. The writers tally up weird angles of bullet entry and Van Gogh’s apparent movements after the shooting – which was most likely a near-accident that resulted from an encounter with one René Secrétan, “a reckless teenager with fantasies of the Wild West”, whose denials are inconsistent, who carried a gun everywhere and who liked to tease the painter when he was drunk. The story, Naifeh and White Smith conclude, planted “a seed in the Van Gogh legend that could not be uprooted by logic or lack of evidence”.

However, in other ways, the writers don’t disturb that legend but merely deepen it. Their Van Gogh is remarkably consistent: at the outset, his character is described as that of a “fanatic”, and everything we see him do fits the template, and every turn of events seems to ensure a more screwed-up central character.

In what amounts to a massive study in psychological profiling, Naifeh and White Smith set up a tragically flawed figure, obsessive but unable to stick at anything: school, jobs, a religious vocation. A strict, guilt-filled upbringing, hitched to progressive rejection by his parents, leaves him wanting to play the prodigal son. Yet his father tries to have him committed to an asylum in his twenties and, when the father dies, his sister tells Vincent that he has effectively killed him.

Grown from a “strange boy” to a friendless, intimacy-starved, repeatedly suicidal emotional knot of a man, Van Gogh passes through a fearful identification with Christ and human suffering to produce an art of rough-edged humility. Through compulsive mania – drawing through the night, relentlessly pursuing models (“locals began to avoid the ‘peculiar’ parson’s son…”) – he becomes a clandestine master of it. In so doing, he finally, though with painful impermanency, finds something controllable in a world apparently and implacably against him.

Related Articles

He becomes, then, a model modern artist – against convention, against the world – through utterly unenviable circumstances: arriving there after everyone has turned away from him, adopting an oppositional pose to salvage some self-respect. This book is not called The Life for nothing, or in hubris. For the authors, clearly, the life shaped the art. “Oh, if only nothing had happened to mess up my life!” Van Gogh yelps, near the end; if so, the authors insist, we wouldn’t have had the paintings.

The book’s structure is a grimly predictable see-sawing: Van Gogh is raptly hopeful about something; then it founders. This rhythm structures his development, keeping a reader on edge. He first discovers oils – painting a seascape in a lashing storm – and it’s wonderful, then he loses confidence. He makes repeated allies only to embark on titanic quarrels with them; not least Paul Gauguin, with whom he dreams of a creative brotherhood but then, inevitably, has blazing fights. “Every surge of hope was followed by new obstacles,” the authors write on page 608, by which time you feel like you’ve heard that phrase a hundred times.

The Van Gogh summoned here is, in effect, at once hugely detailed and two-dimensional, an intricate cut‑out: always lashing out – you wouldn’t want to have known him – and extreme in his responses to the world.

Naifeh and White Smith begin by saying that “no one believed in the importance of biography” – the life explaining the maker – “more fervently than Vincent van Gogh”. That’s their rationale, apparently, for producing this engrossing but in some ways fiercely old-fashioned book.

At once a model of scholarship and an emotive, pacy chunk of hagiography, Van Gogh: The Life swallows archives whole to argue that the tempestuous, tragic, romantic figure of the artist we always had was the correct one, the main difference being that his exit was probably in keeping with the majority of his terrible, yet impossibly fruitful, three-and-a-half decades on earth: beyond his control.